John Horne Burns (1916–1953)

This book is said to be a novel, but could with nearly as much justification be considered a collection of short stories. Unity of location and time argue for treating it as one work, however.
The conceit at the heart of the book is the dual meaning of the word “gallery.” Much of the plot unrolls in the Galleria Umberto, an arcade where one can find, legally or illegally, nearly everything in this otherwise destitute city. But Burns uses the alternate meaning of the term to explore what show more is on display here. He alternates nine portraits, tales complete in themselves with no overlapping characters, and eight promenades. Unlike the portraits, which all take place in Naples in August 1944, the promenades, which could with equal accuracy have been called landscapes, follow the progression of the Allies from Casablanca to Naples. Unlike the portraits, there is a recurring character, the “I” of the narrator. Each begins “I remember.” There are also some recurring secondary characters, a mess sergeant, a corporal, and a pfc. Their dialogue reflects varying attitudes of the occupiers, from vulturous to well-meaning but ineffectual.
There is a third unity in the book, the relentless theme that war defiles. Is this an effect that war has on otherwise decent people, or does it rip off a thin veneer of civilization to reveal the ugly, underlying truth? The book doesn’t land clearly on either side of the question. The evidence of some stories would seem to point the book in the latter direction, but some others, such as the final portrait, Moe, portray how the war experience deepened the humanity of some.
Another theme emerges in the last few chapters: admiration for the Neapolitans, many of whom seemed, compared to the invaders, better able to maintain a semblance of dignity amidst the general rubble and corruption.
Each of the portraits is memorable. The book’s tone falters in the last two promenades, when the narrator arrives in Naples. Description and incident recede, editorial judgment intrudes. Overall, though, I found the book compelling. show less

Burns has a unique voice—or I should say voices, as each individual piece, most written in the first person, has its own unique tenor and sense. For example, one is from the point of view of a well-to-do Italian lady of a certain age who owns and runs a Naples bar catering to military homosexuals. Burns renders her omniscience believable despite the fact that she is beset by chaos.

The book’s structure reminds me of Moussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition—a visit to an art gallery, show more during which we move from picture to picture, all of which bear some resemblance and relevance to the others, despite their wholly unrelated surface details. My tour showed me the various faces of American World War II experience in 1944 in southern Italy and northern African. Not surprisingly, it is often jarring, unfamiliar, grotesque, and exotically seductive.

The chapter entitled “Queen Penicillin” is at once gut wrenching, distressing, and amusing. It centers on an American army hospital devoted to treatment of venereal diseases, and one gets a glimpse of the intersection of disingenuous military and medical attitudes and practices with sufferers’ anguish and the humor they employ to cope with it. Neither has much to do with the other, and “compassion” isn’t part of anybody’s lexicon.

Many of the stories’ narrators inject what was probably widely used slang, and its startling presence revealed just how P.C. today’s writing and speech has become. References to “Eyetalians,” “Ginsos,” “Ayrabs,” and the like served to throw off concentration, but all I needed to get back on track was to recall that the book was first published in 1947. It also became evident a few chapters in that Burns uses this kind of terminology as a lightly veiled criticism of the demeanor and superiority endemic to American military men and women of that era and place.

I’ve read that, at the time of the The Gallery’s first publication, Burns came in for some scathing criticism because it deals fairly openly with gay people and lives. At that time, this was fully unexpected. Other than the crowd in the bar mentioned earlier, most members of which are out and out caricatures for bad behavior, the author bestows on the maybe-gay characters his clear-eyed understanding that is one part objectively critical and two parts compassionate. Even the shut-down, married, opportunistic, closet-case who heads up an office of letter-reading censor cannot be easily despised and dismissed, because Burns gives us such a precise vision of where he comes from and what he fears.

With only a dozen pages to go, this book has continued to hold my interest, even though it has sometimes tried my patience. Reading it has taught me many things, not just about the American in the southern European theater of World War II, but about thoroughly accomplished and honest writing. show less

This is truly a neglected classic from the years just after World War II. More a series of character sketches than a novel it is nonetheless a brilliant evocation of soldiers in Italy, and Naples in particular, during the war. The section called "Momma" has rightly been noted as an outstanding depiction of gay men in war, but the rest of the novel does not fall far from the standard set in this section. Burns uses a realistic style to expose the foibles of men at war. For example, he shows show more the buffoonery and foolishness, if not outright criminal behavior, of many officers. This is almost a decade before the more famous shot taken by Joseph Heller in his Catch-22.
Given the inventive structure and vivifying prose I consider this novel deserves a place of honor among the best of post-war American literature. show less

One of the pleasures in searching through the book reviews of the late 1940s is finding a book such as this: a war novel—one highly lauded in its own time, barely mentioned in succeeding years, and the subject of revival attempts—which still stands up, and in fact exceeds its reputation, after six decades of similar works. Though Shirley Hazard claims, in a blurb on the book cover, that “no one will ever forget this book” it is not one of the more well-known WWII novels, though it show more was one of the first in the wave of those published by servicemen. It is likely due to the author’s inability to launch a glorious career after its publication that it is today more obscure than some lesser WWII novels from the same era—like Gore Vidal’s taut but narrowly focused Williwaw—whose authors went on to literary celebrity.

Vidal has been The Gallery’s chief champion since Burns’ death in 1953 at the age of 36. He has repeatedly called the book the finest novel of WWII, and wrote a profile of Burns in which the man comes across as a homosexual supremacist, an alcoholic, as well as “a gifted man who wrote a book in excess of his gift, making a masterpiece that will endure in a way he himself could not.”

The book was reprinted in 2004 as part of the invaluable New York Review of Books Classics series, but I couldn’t easily find a copy of this edition. I ended up getting a hold of a first edition through inter-library loan. It is less a novel than a series of short stories set in allied-occupied Italy and linked by the Galleria, an arcade in Naples where US Servicemen interface with the locals through the black market and prostitution. I’m reminded of Alfred Hayes’ All Thy Conquests, for, as in that book, the US Military is shown as a lumbering group of horny, dishonest, naïve, bureaucratic, segregated, xenophobic boy-men occupying a nation (in both cases Italy) with a culture too intricate and ancient for them to understand.

A nurse with a severe attitude toward those she’s come to help hides her valuables from her Italian maid: She knew full well that ten minutes after she’d locked her apartment door the signorina would be entertaining some fisherman from the Bay of Naples on the couch. They’d jabber at each in dialect, laugh at the Allies, hang Mr. Roosevelt’s picture upside down, and have one another til supper time. Or two clergymen with divergent views on the poor: (Father Donovan) thought of the tragedy of the children of Europe, born and passing their formative years under a rain of bombs, keeping alive by catering to the desires of soldiers. If these children grew into cold bitter reptiles, then the world would really have lost the war…

—Next week, said Chaplain Bascom, if we’re still here, I mean to bring some soap and wash these children’s mouths out.

—There are better uses for soap in Naples than that.

Burns’ perceived that America would be the reigning military behemoth of the rest of the 20th century and that though it wished to be judged by its stated values and official benevolence toward the peoples whom it sought to liberate, it would be judged by the individuals it chose to represent itself. Individuals, like the officer who sets up his own petty mail censorship empire in the conquered land.

I’m tempted to just keep reproducing passages from the book, for there are hundreds of examples of Burns’ excellent, ironic or sometimes odd prose. I’ll end with a quote that is a little of each: But often Hal thought that his only salvation would be to marry Jeanne. For she had that awareness and resignation of spirit that has sipped everything lovely in life, letting such values be her guide through some mortal experience that has purged her. The focus of her compassion was in her breasts, geometric as cones. Her nipples seemed to see show less